Five Business Uses For Social Media

Are you using social networking sites to full potential for your business? How many of these 5 different applications do you currently take advantage of?

1) To get breaking industry news. Since social media is real-time, you can often get advance notice or inside information about events, announcements, regulations, innovations, and more. Staying in touch with a community of customers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, consultants, regulators, and others can help keep you on the leading edge in your industry. Note: the quality of what you can learn will depend on the quality of people you follow and interact with.

2) To research your competitors. To observe what competitors are doing, what they are saying, what they are offering, how they may be expanding, and what consumers think of them.

3) To research your prospects. To observe what consumers are saying to each other, what they are wishing for, where there might be opportunities for new products or services, where needs aren't being met in the marketplace. (Killer bonus: learn exact words and phrases to use in keyword targeting for your advertising and website!)

4) To connect with prospects. Be careful how you approach this. Most people on social media networks are there to be social, and may lash out at people who are obviously trying to sell them something. Answer? Leave the sales pitch at the door. If you offer good advice consistently, people will learn to trust you and will come to you when they need to buy what you sell. Just link to your website and carry on.

5) To connect with other businesses. You can promote your products or services by interacting with your retailers and resellers. Or you can put yourself in front of thousands of new consumers by connecting with complimentary businesses. Or you can help promote your industry by working with your competitors. (For example, if you have a local business (landscaping, painting, computer installation, hair salon, clothing store, etc.), you can chat and share tips with identical businesses and consumers in other cities without risk. This makes you both look great.)

Give some thought to this list, as it may help add depth or scope to your social media activities, or it may help you focus on the primary reason that you're on there. Remember, the benefits of using social media will be different for a dentist, car dealer, musician, manufacturer, retailer, etc. And remember to be social before anything else!

Twitter Unveils User Photo Galleries

Twitter is now rolling out a photo hosting feature, with a preview of a user's images on their profile page and a link to a gallery of all their pictures.
You can access anyone's photo gallery either by clicking the link, or by adding "/media/grid" after their profile page address.

The profile shows 4 previews... https://twitter.com/#!/cnn

from the gallery page... https://twitter.com/#!/cnn/media/grid


This is similar to what Facebook did long ago, showing a row of pictures at the top of user profiles. While Twitter says there's no way to control it, it seems the preview contains the 4 most recent pictures.

Now we'll see if people get as creative with the Twitter photo previews as they did with the Facebook photo previews.

One Great Security Advantage
Since Twitter allows you to upload a photo as part of any standard tweet, it eliminates the need to give third-party applications (twitpic, yfrog, img.ly, etc.) any access to your account. This is really fantastic because it eliminates any possibility of password theft or spamming your timeline.

Macs At Twitter, Social CEOs, Gmail, Youtube...

Here's a look behind the scenes at Twitter, highlighting their exclusive use of Macs and Apple software.

Here's an article about how the elite Fortune 100 CEOs basically don’t use social media.

Gmail got some new features. The official Gmail blog has an overview. As usual, Google makes a huge deal out of another microscopic and potentially useless update, this time the ability to label messages.

YouTube lets you customize your channel page. So far you can change colors and add a header and background. Check the official YouTube video blog for more news.

Facebook, E-Commerce, Twitter ads...

Grady Burnett has now joined Sheryl Sandberg working at Facebook. They both had been senior employees in the Adwords/AdSense units at Google. This is big news as Facebook continues to work on more targeted ways to nail members with advertising. These two people will likely be valuable in helping develop a better interface for the advertisers as well.

Here's a good, concise interview about e-commerce and conversion rates from Web Pro News.

I get the feeling that Microsoft may begin serving ads on Twitter soon. They've been testing for some time in markets outside North America. There's also a company called Federated Media that runs a site called www.exectweets.com, which extracts the tweets of business executives from Twitter. This is just one of the many "powered by Twitter" sites, but is noteworthy due to a partnership with Microsoft, which runs ads on the site.

Twitter Is A Search Engine?

Recently, a couple of tech industry types have suggested that Twitter isn't a microblogging site, but is a search engine. Huh? And they're being serious. So the next time you're looking for a website that sells computer parts, or a video to show you how to make fishing lures, I guess all you need to do is search Twitter.

Let's think about this for a second. CNN is a news site, I'm sure we can agree on that. But wait... all of the content on the site, both articles and videos, can be searched. So doesn't that make it a search engine, rather than a news site? Hardly. The only thing it means is their content is searchable, which is no different than any other site with lots of content. Hundreds of thousands of sites have a search feature. Likewise, the fact that I can search for "skateboarding" videos on YouTube, or "hockey" news on my local newspaper site doesn't make them search engines. All it means is the webmaster was smart enough to put a search box on the site so people can find what they came for.

If I need to know what time a movie starts downtown tonight, I'll want to find the movie theater website. Which means I'll do a search on Yahoo or Google and find it in 15 seconds. Alternately, I could search Yahoo or Google for a mortgage calculator, or pictures of David Letterman, or information about turtles, or anything else I could possibly think of. What kind of idiot would search for those things on Twitter? The results, if any, would be nothing more than telling you who recently said the word "turtle" in a message. Wow, that's some search engine.

Twitter lets people post comments and communications. And it happens to have an internal search tool, the same as any other site. It isn't a search engine.

Google/Yahoo/Bing/Ask will search the entire landscape of the internet with the sole purpose of finding what you've asked for. Articles, pictures, videos, whatever. Which is why they are called search engines.